College basketball ends on a high note, but I’m glad it ended

After what may have been the least entertaining college basketball season since the 1960s, we got a national championship game worthy of the sport.

Louisville and Michigan delivered by far the most entertaining game I saw in the tournament. If you didn’t enjoy that contest, you simply don’t like basketball.

It was a difficult year for college basketball fans, especially those of us in Texas. For the first time since 1977, when the NCAA Tournament had only 32 teams. (For the record, there are 68 teams in the tournament these days.)

Overall, the product simply wasn’t very good. Scoring was down to where it was in the early 1950s, before America even knew who Ozzie and Harriett were.

The sport is too much fun, even with the indentured servants providing the cheap labor, to let it continue to slide backward.

Already faced with significantly less talent in the game than so many of us grew up watching, college basketball games have turned into wrestling matches without the chair-throwing.

We could forgive the lack of talent if the games are entertaining. After all, we’ll never go back to the days when players like Clyde Drexler, Hakeem Olajuwon, Rob Williams, Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd, Rodney and Scooter McCray and Milt Wagner all showed up at the same Final Four.

But defenders being allowed to hold, grab and bump on and off the ball lead to boring basketball. It’s not that we need wild, up-and-down games to enjoy the sport, but basketball is supposed to be relatively contact free. College players aren’t given the freedom to display their skills because of all the physical play that goes unchecked.

Worse, the officiating is so bad it is infuriating.

The charging calls have gotten to be ridiculous. I’m a huge fan of defense, but secondary defenders stepping to draw charges has turned into the cheapest trick in the sport, and officials reward it by calling so few blocking fouls that coaches are teaching players to play the percentages instead of play defense.

Hopefully tonight’s game will open a window into how the game should be played.

And to a lesser extent, how it should be officiated. Refs let the teams play, which is good, but often they let too much go and, as has been the case throughout the season, the bad calls were blatantly bad.